Aceticon

engineers

people skills.

Not really two positively correlated things, probably negatively correlated.

I belonged to a small left-wing party in my own country where the oldies (the party was born from the union of parties which dated back to before the anti-Fascist Revolution in my country, which was more than 50 years ago) kinda decided to pass the baton to the younger generation and almost as one stepped aside and passed control to mainly 20-something years olds, all of whom scions of the Middle Class.

The result was that the party went up in votes when the Left had a resurgence, got into an informal coalition with the mainstream supposedly (but not really) center-left party in Government, to keep the right-wing one out of power, and after that in a period of two elections collapsed to the lowest vote ever.

As I see it, the party leadership lacked experience (being all from a narrow social circle and lacking all both broad and long life experience) and didn't even have a concrete pre-made Ideology to guide them like, say, the old-fashioned Communists or even the Neoliberals have, because they dropped the strength of ideology of the old guard when they took over and instead just made it up as they went with no strong anchoring on fundamental Principles or a well thought framework, so ended up copying stuff they saw on the Net from Anglo-Saxon countries which was basically right-wing shit disguised as left-wing (i.e. for example "Equality" by treating people differently depending of the genes they were born with, aka Identity Politics), were easily manipulated and outsmarted by the mainstream party leadership and wouldn't really spot social or economic problems until they had hit their narrow socio-economic segment for a while, or have well-thought strategies to solve them, ending up being just another bunch of politicians making the same promises as the rest (which means that outside the party faithful they had trouble gaining trust from the electorate who just saw them as people who sounded the same as the rest.

IMHO, I think left-wing movements need variety both on the ages of the people involved and their backgrounds in socio-economic terms and life experience, to avoid falling into political traps, becoming little more than groupthink circle-jerks and being disconnected from most of society - being left-wing means working for the many rather than the few, so you should probably have people from all over and of all kinds, in positions within the movement were they're actually participating in setting the direction of that movement, rather than having only a narrow age range, socio-economic background or path in life in control.

The fetishization of youth is narrow-minded and self-defeating for a left-wing party, especially nowadays, when most young people grew up under Neoliberalism thus have interiorised as "the way things are" many economic and social practices they grew up with which really aren't "the only way to do it" just the way things have been done in the last 5 decades, and have never thought about Politics in Power Dynamics terms since, unlike in the old days, there is very little talk of non-Governmental forms of Power in present day politics.

This is just as true for the fetishization of old age, social class or educational level - it's not a specific age range, socio-economic origin or path in life that's the problem, it's the narrowing of ideas, perspectives and sources of information that is the result of one group monopolizing the discussion and decision-making.

There are two ways to deal with one's position in the Social Ladder: one can either concentrate one's efforts in climbing up or one can concentrate one's efforts into keeping the ones below down.

IMHO, the US used to have mainly the former, but not anymore, whilst the UK (at least by the time I got there, in the 00s, and since) has mostly the latter (and judging by this traditional idea that "people should know their place" reflected in British Theatre and Humour, it has been so for a long time).

I keenly remember this Polish immigrant in Britain interviewed on TV who was in favor of Brexit very overtly so than no more people came.

More broadly, it's all Tribalism.

You'll see it at many levels, not only towards the "outsiders" in nation terms (and examples are not only the anti-immigrant discourse but also in the discourse mainly blaming a country's problems on some "foreign power" or other, in both cases as if insiders didn't have vastly more power than such outsiders) but also at various other tribal levels (race, political party, region, city and even town in so-called "small town" environments).

The human tendency from Tribalism will turn even otherwise "good people" (but not very competent when it comes to introspection or having a strong keen sense of what is Just) into mindless "us vs them" drones who are easy to manipulate into blaming outsiders for the outcomes of the actions of insiders especially because they tend to believe any old bollocks from the "chiefs" of their tribe.

The word you're probably looking for is "Racism".

Extreme Racism.

(Curiously not just from the outright Fascists but also from the very people who have spent the last 4 decades doing performative anti-Racism whilst destroying Democracy by making it a secondary power to Money)

The Nazi way of looking at people never went away, they just changed the lists of ubermenschen and untermenschen - the lives of those from the sub-human races are clearly worth much much less than the lives of those from the master races (which is curiously reflected on how most of the Press will talk about Israelis getting "murdered" whilst Palestinians merely "die").

(For me Germany is especially disappointing in this regard - a nation supporting a SECOND Holocaust, is clearly not better than when it did the first)

Fucking New Nazis doing their own Holocaust, supported by other fucking New Nazi politicians in the US and Europe.

Being very much a consensus based talk-shop of competing interests and varied points of view is both the EU's weakness and it's greatest strength: it takes ages for it to act but when it does, it does so in a far more organized way, with more staying power and better long term results than the "rush in, break shit up, rush out leaving it all broken" of players like the US (as seen in places like Iraq and Afghanistan).

The "American Way" has a lousy track record of delivering stability by itself (did it ever manage to do so after WWII?) whilst the EU Way has a lousy track record of actually going all the way to the stage of actually doing something (though it tends to act in ways other than the military).

In the long run I think the EU's way delivers much better outcomes for everybody involved, if and when it does manage to get around to actually act in an assertive way.

In summary, then EU is pretty shit when it comes to immediate reaction and at actually doing anything but it works in long-running situations which are complex to untangle and creating long term stable outcomes.

A good example of the EU Way is the handling of the break up of Yugoslavia, though one could say it was more a cooperation of the American Way and the EU Way.

We have ‘freedom of expression’

The HRA says that we are free to express ourselves as we see fit so long as it is within the confines of the law.

That's only freedom of expression for those who make the laws.

Judging by the location it crashed and somebody interviewed saying that "they were afraid it would hit the vehicle below", it careened down for quite a distance since it crashed near the bottom.

Mind you, that specific funicular doesn't actual travel that much of a distance (maybe 400m if I remember correctly - it's been a long time since I had a reason to go to that part of Lisbon).

Also because it's not that long a distance, it's actually faster to just walk it up or down for most people than wait for it, plus this was the one coming down (as deduced from there being one below), so it's quite likely that most people in it were tourists.

Putin's a complete total psychopath for whom human life has no value.

And yet he's fucking Mother Theresa of Calcuta by comparison with mass baby murderer Netanyahu whose troops actively target children.

You will notice that Merz has "forgotten" about Netanyahu is this "most serious war criminal of our time" scale.

This is all smoke & mirrors: German mainstream politicians loved Putin and they especially loved the money they got paid when they retired from politics for "consuting work" or even board memberships in companies like Gazprom, and it took months and a lot of pressure from everybody else in the West to get Germany to start disconnecting from Russia and reduce the money they sent Putin's regime for things like gas which was used by the likes of BASF as cheap raw material in their processes to get a competitive advantage over other chemical companies. Also getting them to actually start supporting Ukraine militarily was like trying to pull teeth out - I remember how everybody and their dog had to send tanks to Ukraine before Germany finally got around to sending their old tanks there.

I very much doubt that these statements from Merz are any more than pure image management, especially because his "unwavering support of the Jewish State" (his own words) has showned that for him too, just like for Putin, human life has no value when a person is not from the "right" ethnicity.

Too many guns leads to weekly school shootings.

US: We need more guns!